By Sarah A. Spitz
Culver City, CA (The Hollywood Times) 5/11/26 At this global political moment, a play that asks where the line is between mad and dangerously insane becomes more relevant than ever — even if this rarely-staged play was written in 1961, by a Swiss playwright and mystery writer.
Imagine you’ve made a discovery so potentially catastrophic that the only rational thing to do is pretend to be insane and check yourself into a sanatorium to keep that knowledge out of the hands of dangerous people who could use it to destroy mankind. Throw in a couple of murders, a questionable police inspector and an off-kilter psychiatrist and you have The Physicists, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
It’s exactly the kind of darkly comedic play The Actors’ Gang — one of LA’s most inventive and provocative theatre companies — loves to produce on its Culver City stage. Actors’ Gang Artistic Director and founder Tim Robbins has considered it one of his favorite plays for more than 40 years. The audience at the first preview gave it a standing ovation.
Dürrenmatt sets up his serious premise with a comedic approach. “The timing is perfect,” says director Brent Hinkley, co-founder of the Actors’ Gang alongside Robbins, who met when the two were students at UCLA. “The relevancy of the play right now, dealing with nuclear arms and capabilities in the wrong hands, still resonates absolutely today.
“The script reveals a huge amount of both hidden and overt humor that Dürrenmatt built into the piece. It is as though the big question of our humanity could be something funny.”
In the play, the world’s greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, has committed himself to a sanatorium, claiming to be haunted by the ghost of King Solomon. His fellow patients are two equally deluded scientists — one who believes he is Isaac Newton, the other Albert Einstein.
The comedy is dark, with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance between them. And these physicists, as the play peels back its layers, may not be as harmless as they first appear. And then there is the psychiatrist, Dr. Mathilde von Zahnd…keep an eye on her.
“Dürrenmatt takes a very serious subject and deals with it in such a funny, comedic way,” Hinkley explains. “You have three insane men in an insane asylum, with an even more insane doctor, and an even more insane police inspector. And yet he’s asking: what is our moral responsibility? What do we do with knowledge that can destroy us?”
The question is not just historical. When Dürrenmatt wrote The Physicists, he was responding to the Cold War arms race, the shadow of Hiroshima, the realization that human ingenuity may outstrip human wisdom. That shadow has not lifted. If anything, it has been amplified as we face threats from artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, biohacking, and geopolitical flashpoints that feel disturbingly familiar.
“One of my favorite lines in the play is when the main physicist Möbius, who’s discovered a principle that will lead to destructive weaponry, says, ‘Either we eliminate ourselves from the memory of mankind, or mankind eliminates itself.’ It really hits home and touches me deeply.”
The play touches on many of the great anxieties of its era — institutional psychiatry, the line between manageable madness and dangerous insanity, the moral weight of scientific knowledge. But its central question is one that has never gone away: what happens when science outpaces the wisdom of the people who wield it?
“The question of nuclear power has been topical since World War II,” Hinkley notes, “as it was twenty years later when this play was written, as it was during the Iraq war, and as it is now.” The world keeps handing Dürrenmatt new relevance, absurd comedy wrapped around existential dread.
Hinkley has been with The Actors’ Gang since its founding in 1981, when a group of punk rock theater artists—led by the Oscar-winning Robbins—set out to create a new kind of theater in Los Angeles. Hinkley performed in the company’s original 1982 staging of Ubu the King, and went on to direct productions ranging from Titus Andronicus to Underneath the Lintel, a one-man show that swept the Ovation Awards, winning Best Production, Best Director, and Best Actor.
Hinkley has never actually seen The Physicists. “It’s not done very often,” he says. “I couldn’t think of the last time it was done, even off-Broadway.” So rather than wrestling with someone else’s interpretation, Hinkley started from scratch.
He did, however, unearth photographs from the original 1962 Swiss production, some of which show Dürrenmatt himself on the rehearsal floor. “I thought, that’s a window into how he would see the play,” Hinkley says. “And it all seemed very naturalistic.” Which represents a change from other Actors’ Gang production designs, which are usually either spare and suggestive, or exaggeratedly outsized rather than realistic.
Longtime collaborator and set designer Chris Bell evokes the lounge of a genteel Swiss sanatorium: tables, chairs, couches, a small easel for the patients’ art, a game table with puzzle pieces. “Anything to take their minds off the cruelty of the world,” as Hinkley puts it — an entirely naturalistic setting for events that grow increasingly and surreally unnatural.
What Hinkley brings to The Physicists is the advantage of long collaboration with a company of actors who, for many years, have shared a stage, an acting style, a vocabulary and a set of instincts.
“We have a lot of common language and skill sets, fantastic comedic actors who’ve been with the group since the 80s, 90s and 2000s, who can find where the humor is in a long sequence of dismal talk. And the way they play off each other, receive and listen, just to watch them in action together, it’s like dominoes…one falls, the next falls, one gets up, the other gets up. We find the comedy through ensemble work. And they mine the comedy for all it’s worth.”
Inventor and futurist Nikola Tesla once wrote: “You will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.” But The Physicists, for all its darkness, does not end in despair. Hinkley insists the play arrives at something like hope, and that the comedy, far from undercutting the seriousness of its themes, is precisely what makes it bearable.
The New York Times, reviewing the original 1964 Broadway production directed by Peter Brook, put it this way: the play is “an unsparing parable on the pass to which this radioactive planet has been brought.”
Six decades on, the parable is still unsparing, the planet is still radioactive. and three men in a Swiss sanatorium are still, improbably, making us laugh about it.
The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt is onstage through June 20, Thursdays and Saturdays at 8 pm, Sundays, May 31, June 7 and June 14 at 2 pm. The Actors’ Gang Theater, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232. Tickets and info: www.theactorsgang.com 310-838-4264
